This week on the podcast, Charlie Sinks joins us to talk about everything we learned at the Upper Midwest Regional User Group meeting. We talk about PeopleTools 8.56, changes in Lifecycle Management, Fluid adoption, Elasticsearch, Dan’s DPK session, and much more.

We want to make this podcast part of the community discussion on PeopleSoft administration. If you have comments, feedback, or topics you’d like us to talk about, we want to hear from you! You can email us at podcast@psadmin.io, tweet us at @psa_io, or use the Twitter hashtag #psadminpodcast.

This week Dan talks about his 8.55 Go-Live weekend, simplifying patch download with getMOSPatch, and using Kyle’s Maintenance Backdoor. Then Kyle and Dan discuss strategies and tips to make Go-Live weekends successful.

We want to make this podcast part of the community discussion on PeopleSoft administration. If you have comments, feedback, or topics you’d like us to talk about, we want to hear from you! You can email us at podcast@psadmin.io, tweet us at @psa_io, or use the Twitter hashtag #psadminpodcast.

This week Kyle and Dan talk about scripting Change Assistant, DPK Patching and how many PeopleSoft customers plan on staying with the platform. The podcast ends with Dan sharing his Oh No! story about Go-Live passwords.

We want to make this podcast part of the community discussion on PeopleSoft administration. If you have comments, feedback, or topics you’d like us to talk about, we want to hear from you! You can email us at podcast@psadmin.io, tweet us at @psa_io, or use the Twitter hashtag #psadminpodcast.

This week, Kyle interviews Sasank Vemana about User Interface development in PeopleSoft. Sasank presented at Reconnect and shared some great projects he’s done to improve the UI in PeopleSoft. Dan and Kyle also discuss uploading Customer Data into the PUM and how we arrange our monitors.

We want to make this podcast part of the community discussion on PeopleSoft administration. If you have comments, feedback, or topics you’d like us to talk about, we want to hear from you! You can email us at podcast@psadmin.io, tweet us at @psa_io, or use the Twitter hashtag #psadminpodcast.

This week on the podcast, Kyle gives a recap of the Reconnect 2016 conference. Some of the highlights we discuss are a PUM Success Story, how to adopt Fluid, and SAML 2.0. Dan and Kyle also discuss the new PeopleSoft Image Videos and using WLST with the DPK.

We want to make this podcast part of the community discussion on PeopleSoft administration. If you have comments, feedback, or topics you’d like us to talk about, we want to hear from you! You can email us at podcast@psadmin.io, tweet us at @psa_io, or use the Twitter hashtag #psadminpodcast.

This week on the podcast, Dan uses an M&M analogy for network security, Kyle asks about SYS databases with the DPK, and we discuss if there are too many technologies used with the DPKs.

We want to make this podcast part of the community discussion on PeopleSoft administration. If you have comments, feedback, or topics you’d like us to talk about, we want to hear from you! You can email us at podcast@psadmin.io, tweet us at @psa_io, or use the Twitter hashtag #psadminpodcast.

Hopefully everyone has had a chance to play around with the new PUM Dashboard delivered in the 8.55 PIs. If not, Logesh from leanITdesigns has a very good write up on it. Dan and I also spend some time discussing it in Podcast #20 – PUM Dashboard. It is basically a new one stop shop for managing the PUM maintenance process. It uses a Fluid dashboard to help keep track of BUGs, customizations and test cases.

I have found the dashboard to be a very nice tool with a lot of promise. That said, I don’t think it is mature enough to really work for ALL your PUM maintenance planning needs. In the near future I can see both Oracle(tweaking the dashboard) and organizations(tweaking their maintenance planning processes) working together to make this dashboard truly useful.

Even before this dashboard, one thing I have been doing for our organization is providing a spreadsheet report that lists all the BUGs we have not yet applied. In theory, this can now be replaced by the dashboard. However, our group is pretty used to this spreadsheet and it gives them a little more personalized control of this data. As the dashboard improves, I’m hoping this report can go away and everyone can just be directed to the dashboard.

Queries

In the past, to generate this report I had to create a “Get Current” change package in PUM. This would of course list all the unapplied BUGs in a grid online. I would export the grid to excel, then copy and paste into the report template. This worked fine, but now there is a better way – leveraging the PUM Dashboard queries.

The PUM Dashboard drives off of a set of queries. These queries all have a prefix of PTIA and can be found under the normal Query Viewer or Manager component in your PI. Here is a list of a few of them:

PTIA_BUG_TARGET_DETAIL

PTIA_BUG_IMAGE_DETAIL

PTIA_BUG_PRODUCT_DETAIL

PTIA_STATUS_BY_IMAGE

PTIA_STATUS_BY_PROD

I found the PTIA_BUG_TARGET_DETAIL to be the most useful. This query was basically the same output I used to get with my change package grid export. One thing I did add to this detail was a link directly to the BUG Matrix in My Oracle Support(https://support.oracle.com/epmos/faces/BugMatrix?id=YOUR_BUG_ID_HERE). Our group has found this very useful when researching a BUG and wanting a little more detail than what is listed in PUM.

PUM Backlog Report

I have packaged up my spreadsheet report and posted it to GitHub, in case anyone else is interested. Since this report shows all unapplied BUGs from PUM, I have titled it the PUM Backlog Report. The instructions on how to import your PUM data is included in the readme file on GitHub, as well as in the spreadsheet itself. If you have questions or ideas for improvement, feel free to open an issue on GitHub or post in the comments below.

Kyle and Dan discover that PS_CUST_APP_HOME is not supported in 8.55, brainstorm how to use Regular Expressions in PeopleCode, and our impression of the new PUM Dashboard.

We want to make this podcast part of the community discussion on PeopleSoft administration. If you have comments, feedback, or topics you’d like us to talk about, we want to hear from you! You can email us at podcast@psadmin.io, tweet us at @psa_io, or use the Twitter hashtag #psadminpodcast.

As we have discussed in part 1 and part 2 of this discussion, Oracle is now shipping PeopleSoft Images with 8.55 and Deployment Kits(DPKs). Dan and I have talked quite a bit about our experiences using these DPKs with VirtualBox and NativeOS installments on Windows, so naturally Linux is up next. This is the OS that I spend most of my time in, so I have been excited to give it a try.

To get started, I took another read through the PeopleSoft Deployment Packages for Update Images Installation guide. Again, this can be found under Installation Documentation on the PUM Home Page. In this document it clearly states that Oracle Linux is supported for this installation. I normally don’t run Oracle Linux, so I was curious if it would work on other flavors. I gave it a try on both SuSE and Ubuntu without success. The bootstrap script basically fails right away, and I didn’t dig any further. So, I spun up a fresh lab install of Oracle Linux 7.2 and used that instead.

As with the other styles of DPK, the first step after you download the Linux .zip files is to extract the first file. Once extracted, you will find a setup directory which contains the bootstrap script psft-dpk-setup.sh. Before running this script, you will need to enable execution by running sudo chmod +x psft-dpk-setup.sh. After that, execute the bootstrap script and you are off and running.

I ran into a few issues with the installation, all related to dependencies(Update:More info here.). I ended up having to install all these packages to get past the issues:

After getting these installed, it was time to give it another try. Running the bootstrap script again was not needed for this. Instead, I simply ran puppet apply site.pp which needed to be executed from the /etc/puppet/manifests directory. This time everything ran to success.

I chose the default initialization process, but you may want to make a few changes in your deployment. The changes you are most likely to make are related to security. By default the DPK will create 4 local user accounts: psadm1, psadm2, psadm3 and oracle2. This may not fit in with your security polices, so changing this could be crucial. In the installation guide, search for Task 6-1, which will walk you through the changes needed in your psft_customization.yaml file. If you do choose the defaults, then take a look at Task 7-1. This will cover all the default installation directories, as well as the default users and how they are used.

As always, if you ran into any other issues or have other observations related to the Linux NativeOS install, please let us know about it in the comments below!

Update: If you want to learn more about the DPK, check out our new PeopleSoft DPK QuickStart course. This free course will introduce you to the DPK, show you how to use the DPK with PeopleSoft Images, and show you how to customize the DPK for your servers.